Whirlwind tour takes MacMaster back home

Natalie MacMaster is home on the East Coast this weekend for a mini-Maritime tour that includes the Celtic Colours International Festival on Friday.

Autumn is the season when the year starts to wind down the clock, but this year for Natalie MacMaster it’s all about fresh starts.

This Thanksgiving weekend, the Cape Breton fiddler is home on the East Coast for a mini Maritime tour that includes an appearance at the Celtic Colours International Festival’s opening gala in Port Hawkesbury on Friday and a Monday matinee at Halifax’s Rebecca Cohn Auditorium. It’s familiar enough territory for her, but this time she’s coming with a recently reconfigured band playing new-to-you sets of jigs and reels, and it’s also her first trip home with her newborn son Alec Francis, born to Ontario-based MacMaster and husband Donnell Leahy in August.

“It’s been great, but it’s always busy,” says MacMaster of her trip home, on the phone from Troy. “I wish it wasn’t so busy, but we always come home around a gig or some kind of event, so you have to cram a whole bunch of things in at once.

“It seems like when I come home there’s always lots going on, but that’s what we do, that’s our life, that’s what we chose.”

MacMaster also has shows tonight in Saint John and Saturday in Fredericton, with Sunday off for a family Thanksgiving before heading to Halifax bright and early Monday morning to get ready for her 3 p.m. Cohn performance. These dates are really her first chance to break in the new band, which sees longtime keyboardist Mac Morin and cellist Nathaniel Smith joined by new guitarist Nate Douglas, from Barrie, Ont. and Montreal percussionist Eric Breton.

“We just spent last week rehearsing, I’d just met these guys. When I say that, I mean they’re not from my musical past, we’d only met over the last three months, but they’re great players,” says MacMaster, who feels the aptly-named Breton will provide the biggest change-up after her previous drummer opted to play behind Shania Twain for her two-year residency at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas.

Stuck for a backbeat for her Canada Day show with the National Arts Centre Symphony on Parliament Hill, MacMaster went looking for a replacement, but found all her rhythmic friends were busy. She got Breton’s name from her friends Cheticamp pianist Rachel Aucoin and her duo partner, Montreal accordion player Sabin Jacques, and loved how he fit into her tunes in Ottawa. She quickly asked him to join the current tour, along with Douglas, joining the ranks of talented pickers who’ve accompanied MacMaster over the years, like Dave MacIsaac, Chris Corrigan and Brad Davidge.

“I’m always looking to freshen things up, but it’s more about the quality of the musicians than the particular instruments,” says MacMaster, looking forward to presenting new arrangements and new tunes, as well as the high-wire-act thrill of putting the rookies through their paces. “I’ve based my band on the players as opposed to the instrumentation. And here we are playing our first show together the night before Celtic Colours!”

“It’s going to be a fantastic show, I’m really excited about it,” she says. “As you know, I have five kids, so that’s where my priority and my devotion is right now, that’s the stage of life I’m in, but I look forward to these kind of opportunities that come along.

“Most of the playing that we do right now is ourselves, where we go on tour and we’re the only gig, as opposed to festivals or shows with opening acts. So this is great because I’m in with a whole bunch of other musicians, and it’s more creative. Because I have personal connections with a lot of them, we’re putting together the finale and collaborations that will happen through the night, and that’s really exciting for me.”

MacMaster’s shows this weekend mark the start of a run of 33 shows from now through mid-December, including a tour of the Northwestern U.S. and a Christmas in Cape Breton tour down the Eastern Seaboard; pretty remarkable considering Alec Francis was only born on Aug. 11, which also happened to be her mother Minnie’s 70th birthday. But he’s getting an early taste of the road, as the MacMaster/Leahy clan grows towards Partridge Family proportions.

“Now that there are five children, we all spend time with Alec, Mary Francis and Michael are holding him a lot, almost as much as I do, which is good because we’re a family, we’re a team,” she explains.

“I feel like I have good baby bonding time. I’m a nursing mother, and that forces you to take time out and sit down with your new baby. As the years go on, I can see why they put so much focus on that. ... As much as my child eats, I spend lots of time with him, it’s so important when they’re little infants.”

But as one new life enters the world, another departs, and MacMaster says she still coming to terms with the death of a member of her extended Celtic Cape Breton family, singer Raylene Rankin, who passed away last weekend after a struggle with cancer.

Besides sharing stages while growing up along the Celidih Trail, Rankin was MacMaster’s roommate when they travelled to the U.S. on Nova Scotia Tourism’s Sea Sell promotional cruise in the late ’80s, and for a time she filled in for fiddler Howie MacDonald when the Rankin Family was on tour in the ’90s.

“It’s amazing how she affects me, and I’m so sad that she’s gone,” says MacMaster, taking a moment to gather her thoughts. “And I’m sad that I never got to say goodbye. That’s what I’m most sad about; I would have loved to tell her that I thought she was a fabulous lady, and that I was thinking of her and praying for her.

“But even though it was tragic that she had to suffer, there’s still great joy in what Raylene has left for all of us. Raylene did it, she was the little Cape Breton girl who sang Gaelic and stepdanced and grew up with music all around her, and look what she did with it. She gave off as much feeling in her singing as any artist I’ve ever heard, there was no hiding how she felt, there was not even a thin veil over her when she was on stage, she was completely exposed. It was like you could hold her heart in your hand.”

For tickets to My Island Too at Celtic Colours (reserved seating, $60/$50/$40), visit the festival’s website at www.celtic-colours.com. Tickets to MacMaster’s Monday afternoon show at Halifax’s Rebecca Cohn Auditorium are $49, available at the Dalhousie Arts Centre box office (494-3820/1-800-874-1669 or online at artscentre.dal.ca).